Week 4: Pictorialism - Clarence Hudson White

Week 4: In our Photography II Class, we are focusing on advancing our skills in articulating our ideas and visions into compelling and aesthetically pleasing photographs. This week, we focused on the subject matter of recreating the artistic photography movement of Pictorialism in which photos are manipulated to resemble paintings or drawings. The photos above are the ten selected pieces I have chosen to illustrate the work I have done this week for the class.

Craft: The Craft of this assignment is the following: Digital SLR Camera (Canon E05 Rebel T5i), a computer, photo lights, Bowens Camera Studio Lights, and the model/subject matter of the photos. I used these resources to create the images above. The Bowens Camera Studio Lights came with stands as well as studio umbrellas for the lights when I used a model. For the Pictorialism aspect of this assignment, I used Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the images by increasing noise, saturating and desaturating, overlaying a cyanotype filter and that sort. I also printed some out to scratch up and alter physically and with a scanner scanning them back.

Composition: In this class, we were tasked with taking photos in the Pictorialism-style in which photos are manipulated to resemble paintings and drawings. To achieve this in the digital age, I used photoshop. But first, I took some photos of a person, my friend. Human beings were a very common subject matter in pictorial photography and thus it was natural that such would be the case for me. After taking the photos in the usual manner as in previous weeks by manually focusing and adjusting ISO, exposure, and aperture, I proceeded to post-production. In photoshop, I overlayed layers of cover to achieve a monochromatic color scheme which was common at the time due to the lack of color photography. I also added noise and blurred the images to resemble that of a painting. I also overlayed textures to give a more grimy appearance. For one of them, I printed the picture, scratched it up and manipulated it further before scanning it in.

Concept: In this project, we were tasked with creating photos that incorporated pictorialism into the themes and process of the photographs. We were also to utilize a notable pictorialist as inspiration. I chose Clarence Hudson White. I chose this because White's photos use a lot of grungy and grimy textures. I was able to recreate that effect by overlaying a texture file over the photograph in Photoshop. As he makes a lot of photographs with people, I chose to use another person as the subject matter as well.